Hello, Cannonballers! I’ve come to swell your ranks and bump up my yearly reading tally. I’m not nervous, honest…
Life Moves Pretty Fast was a nostalgic and amusing start to my reading year. When you think of the best movies, the eighties don’t tend to jump immediately to mind. But Hadley Freeman begs to differ and takes us on a trip through some of her favourite eighties movies and what they taught us, as well as looking at what’s been lost in the movies of today.
Dedicating a chapter per film, some were better than others simply due to my familiarity with them (the chapter on The Princess Bride, arguing correctly that it is one of the best films ever made, also made me put down the book and immediately rewatch for the 15,000th time) or depending on how much you agree with the points they allow Freeman to make (my boyfriend would have poked her eye out had he read what she says about Nolan’s Batmans, and unlike Freeman I would rather bathe in bleach than kiss Andrew McCarthy).
Making a friend watch About Last Night with me recently (she’d never seen it, we’d had wine, and Rob Lowe was soooo pretty), we both took a double take at naked Demi Moore. Breathtakingly beautiful, yes, but also very unlike the bodies of actresses (and Demi) in movies now. The eighties seem to be the last place where women on screen were allowed to be *almost* normal, something which comes up again and again in Life Moves Pretty Fast, as well as how differently we were allowed to dress, who we could star alongside and how old we could be while doing it.
That’s not to make it sound like a long, feminist rant – it’s not (it would be a rather more depressing read if it was). Instead, it’s a nostalgic love letter to the films that made up my formative years, to the characters that peopled them (thank you, John Hughes, for ruining other boys/men for me and thank you, John Cusack, for breaking my heart when I made the mistake of following on Twitter), and to the power ballads that accompanied them.
With each chapter book-ended by a list, this made for prefect if slightly fuzzy headed New Year reading as well as a fine prompt whenever I was looking for something to watch. And on that note, I’m off to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off again.
Oh, this looks like a fun one!
Welcome! And this sounds interesting (adds to growing tbr)
Thanks for the welcome!
Definitely need to read this!
I need to read this. And I too suffered the heartbreak of finding out too much about John Cusack. Thank god I know very little about Joan.
Yeah, I learnt my lesson and no-one else is getting looked up :/
I rewatched season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation over the winter break, and I kept noticing (on my brother’s enormous television) that everyone had normal teeth. Not caps, or bleached scary things. Nope, regular old teeth that are a little askew in some places, and a little coffee or tea stained. It was eye opening and made me miss letting people look… unaltered?
Anyway, this book sounds super interesting and welcome to the fun!
I miss the unaltered look too. I prefer the look of people with a little wonky to them – it’s the quirks that tend to draw me in, rather than perfection.
And thanks for the welcome!
Oooh, I’m looking forward to this and I didn’t even know it existed! John Cusack broke my heart with the advent of social media. The last movie that I think I was able to purely enjoy him in was Grosse Pointe Blank.
That aside, I’ve never been surprised by 80s movie love. If anything, I was horrified that so many of them haven’t been seen by today’s 20-somethings.
Welcome!
I ink that was probably the last one I enjoyed him in too.
I’ve been making my friend plug her 80s movie gaps on a regular basis. Thankfully, she’s loved everything we’ve watched so far (aside from any time one of the blokes sports a crop top)